Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [1]
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-14382-7
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To Barbara
There are several real organizations that send volunteer doctors to Afghanistan but Médecins pour la Liberté is fictional. All the locations described in this book are real except for the villages of Banda and Darg, which are fictional. All the characters are fictional except Masud.
Although I have tried to make the background authentic, this is a work of the imagination, and should not be treated as a source of infallible information about Afghanistan or anything else. Readers who would like to know more will find a reading list at the end of this book.
PART I
1981
CHAPTER ONE
The men who wanted to kill Ahmet Yilmaz were serious people. They were exiled Turkish students living in Paris, and they had already murdered an attaché at the Turkish Embassy and fire-bombed the home of a senior executive of Turkish Airlines. They chose Yilmaz as their next target because he was a wealthy supporter of the military dictatorship and because he lived, conveniently, in Paris.
His home and office were well guarded and his Mercedes limousine was armored, but every man has a weakness, the students believed, and that weakness is usually sex. In the case of Yilmaz they were right. A couple of weeks of casual surveillance revealed that Yilmaz would leave his house, on two or three evenings each week, driving the Renault station wagon his servants used for shopping, and go to a side street in the Fifteenth District to visit a beautiful young Turkish woman who was in love with him.
The students decided to put a bomb in the Renault while Yilmaz was getting laid.
They knew where to get the explosives: from Pepe Gozzi, one of the many sons of the Corsican godfather Mémé Gozzi. Pepe was a weapons dealer. He would sell to anyone, but he preferred political customers, for—as he cheerfully admitted—“Idealists pay higher prices.” He had helped the Turkish students with both their previous outrages.
There was a snag in the car-bomb plan. Usually Yilmaz would leave the girl’s place alone in the Renault—but not always. Sometimes he took her out to dinner. Often she went off in the car and returned half an hour later laden with bread, fruit, cheese and wine, evidently for a cozy feast. Occasionally Yilmaz would go home in a taxi, and the girl would borrow the car for a day or two. The students were romantic, like all terrorists, and they were reluctant to risk killing a beautiful woman whose only crime was the readily pardonable one of loving a man unworthy of her.
They discussed this problem in a democratic fashion. They made all decisions by vote and acknowledged no leaders; but all the same there was one among them whose strength of personality made him dominant. His name was Rahmi Coskun, and he was a handsome, passionate young man with a bushy mustache and a certain bound-for-glory light in his eyes. It was his energy and determination which had pushed through the previous two projects despite the problems and the risks. Rahmi proposed consulting a bomb